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Did you ever consider why the town is jammed with cars? Or why big cities are filled with them? Cars are enormously expensive right now. Owning a decent-sized f

• pertymcpert 5y ago
  > In order to get there, we will have to reduce the amount of apartments per sqkm and even more so the amount of office space and shops. This will work in two ways: It will naturally reduce traffic and free space for car parks. This sounds like prioritizing cars over people. What's the point?
  • criddell 5y ago
    > This sounds like prioritizing cars over people. The cars are used by people. If you prioritize for cars, you are prioritizing for those people.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    If you take choeger's point seriously, that even with all the cost and problems people still find great utility in cars, then creating an urban environment that doesn't have adequate room for cars seems like creating an environment that is hostile to the way people want to live.
  • choeger 5y ago
    That's simply not true. There needs to be a balance, not a priority. If you build a city that is made for pedestrians, how do you leave it from the center? City design nowadays has this "we are only a 500m across plaza" vibe whereas in reality the cities sprawl over tens if not hundreds of km. You cannot make that walkable and you cannot design a transportation system that is as flexible as roads and individual vehicles. Also, people like to own stuff and have the freedom to use it whenever. So if you want to create a city for human beings you need to create a parking space that puts cars out of the way and create roads that are peaceful.
• NoGravitas 5y ago
  > The fact that so many people pay that cost and the inconveniences of maintenance and searching for parking space should motivate you to think about the utility of car ownership. Car ownership has a Prisoners' Dilemma payoff structure to its utility. It's very useful to the car owners, very harmful to society at large. As more and more people have cars, the population of car owners and society at large overlap a lot, meaning everyone is paying the costs. Do you ever wonder why it's so hard to get around without a car? A lot of it is that the need for wide roads for cars, and the need for lots of parking force all of your built infrastructure to be physically spread out. Which means you no longer can get around without a car, which means you need more car infrastructure, which makes it harder to get around without a car...
  • jjk166 5y ago
    It was hard to get around without cars before anyone had cars, hence why people got cars in the first place. Most things we take for granted like being able to get a week's worth of groceries home in one trip or going to enjoy a restaurant that specializes in a niche style, or buying cheap goods at a warehouse store, or being able to get to a hospital within half an hour all require automobile infrastructure. But once you have roads all over the place and parking lots at important destinations, and lots of people owning cars for these necessities, the damage is done, and car travel is the sensible mode for virtually all transportation. The fact is taking a leisurely stroll on a nice spring morning when you want to is very different from being forced to walk for miles through freezing rain in November after a long day of hard work. You want the option to drive. There are lots of good ideas about how to make towns and cities both drivable and walkable. Anyone telling you that the simple existence of car infrastructure is the problem has not thought through what elimination of that infrastructure really means.
    • lolpython 5y ago
      > Most things we take for granted like being able to get a week's worth of groceries home in one trip or going to enjoy a restaurant that specializes in a niche style, or buying cheap goods at a warehouse store, or being able to get to a hospital within half an hour all require automobile infrastructure It's possible to do these things without a car if your city has prioritized making that a reality. The exact mode depends on the city. Some examples: * In the Netherlands, cycling infrastructure is strong enough that you can bike to a big box store outside the city and load up your bike with what you need [0]. You can fit a week's worth of goods in a cargo bike [1] if that's your style. There is also an argument to be made that you don't need to buy groceries weekly if your city is dense and you have a store nearby. * In Pittsburgh, there are flyer (fast track) busses that will take you to malls in the northern car-oriented suburbs as well as light rail to the southern suburbs. So you can reach most niche stores in the metro area by bus/light rail. Although it's pedestrian hostile in the northern burbs. In the city proper, bus coverage is good enough to get basically anywhere including all the niche restaurants. Though light rail is more frequent and pleasant. Bus frequency and reliability is just OK, not great. Could be improved by changing priorities. My point here is that Pittsburgh's urban form is not great but they still came up with transit solutions that work for average people. * In Toronto, busses run every 10 minutes on an enormous number of routes. This reduces transfer times so much that travel time is nearly on parity with cars, even though the city is very car-oriented. I don't understand your note about hospitals because ambulances get the right of way and can travel in bus lanes. > The fact is taking a leisurely stroll on a nice spring morning when you want to is very different from being forced to walk for miles through freezing rain in November after a long day of hard work. I agree, but it's not so bad in a dense urban area with adequate bus shelters, sidewalk clearing and bus lines scattered everywhere. > Anyone telling you that the simple existence of car infrastructure is the problem has not thought through what elimination of that infrastructure really means. The simple existence of car infrastructure is the problem because it causes sprawl and exacerbates our climate emergency. Cities have already come up with the solution and that is good transit, active transit included. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8F5hXqS-Ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8F5hXqS-Ac [1] https://www.bakfiets.nl/bestanden/afbeelding/2019/374-cargo-short-petrolblauw-bakfiets.jpg https://www.bakfiets.nl/bestanden/afbeelding/2019/374-cargo-...
• lolpython 5y ago
  > * Slow, respectful, traffic (30kph should work) -except for some big roads- shared between all vehicles (bikes included) I understand you plan to include bikes on the roads themselves. But making a city less dense and filling it with parking spaces for automobiles makes the city hostile to all except automobiles. > * Zero-emission vehicles Zero tailpipe emissions. EVs still emit 1/2 as much lifetime GHG as a combustion engine personal vehicle [0]. Your plan would make your theoretical town less walkable and bikeable and force former cyclists and pedestrians to drive EVs. This results in net higher emissions since more motor vehicles would be on the road. > Traveling out of the big city or to orthogonally to the main public transportation routes, or with small kids, or with large luggage, with a week worth of shopping bags, or when I have to get rid of garbage... These are valid use cases but they do not justify increasing a town's emissions in the middle of a climate crisis. > In order to get there, we will have to reduce the amount of apartments per sqkm and even more so the amount of office space and shops. This will work in two ways: It will naturally reduce traffic and free space for car parks. This would make the city less economically productive per sq km. Compare the tax revenue from 10 parking spaces in a parking lot versus mixed use row houses & businesses in the same lot. Plus people can actually live in the latter. Is there a housing shortage in your city? There sure is one in mine. And it has tons of tax subsidized parking :) [0] point #4 in https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
  • choeger 5y ago
    > makes the city hostile to all except automobiles. That's simply not true. I saw that working extremely well in downtown Vancouver nearly a decade ago. Parking can easily coexist with apartments and shopping and it can get the cars off the streets, increasing space for everyone. > Zero tailpipe emissions. Yes, because that's what a city needs to care about. Everything else is not city politics. > Your plan would make your theoretical town less walkable and bikeable and force former cyclists and pedestrians to drive EVs. That's simply not true. Offering enough parking decks (and, e.g., garages in apartment buildings) will remove parked cars from the streets. This gives space for slow bikes and pedestrians. Reducing the default speed will make live much better for fast bikes (I consider myself part of the latter group, btw. I speak out of experience). > This would make the city less economically productive per sq km. Since when is that suddenly an argument? First of all, taxes mostly go to the country, where I live. Second, the most economical mode if living would mean to move into some barracks close to the office, and third, transportation already plays a bigger role for local economy than density of living. > Plus people can actually live in the latter. Is there a housing shortage in your city? There sure is one in mine. I bet you are one of these people that buy the argument that building more roads leads to more congestion. Did it ever occur to you that building apartments could actually worsen the housing crisis? Your proposal, to make cities walkable, inevitably increases the housing shortage and yields extremely dense quarters - something I would not consider livable at all. A city should have an upper limit of people per sqkm as it should have a minimum level of green and parks.